Happy New Year! What better way to kick off the new year than with some wholesome Fate goodness. Nothing says it’s the new year than mikan sitting on top of a kotetsu.

Watching Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan just makes me happy. There is something with the extra details by ufotable, the pastel palate, and the slow pacing that makes me think of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. I like the more squishy oval faces, which remind me a bit of Animal Crossing. I like the cow on the TV in this scene. I also like how the kids playing around the shopping carts are animated.

There’s just a lot of good animation in this show. Without the need for fancy CG effects or action sequences, ufotable can focus on what really matters: peeling shrimp. The cooking sequences are very gorgeously animated.

(Also the reason to cut the tip of the shrimp tail is to drain the inside of water. You don’t want excess water in the shrimp when you fry it.)

Backgrounds are also really good too. A lot of movement that one wouldn’t usually see outside of movies. This is the exact opposite of Dynamic Chord when it comes to animation.

The Fate franchise is continuing to enjoy a popularity that I haven’t seen since… well… Sailor Moon? And Sailor Moon doesn’t even boast having Japan’s most popular mobile phone game. ufotable’s A-team is still hard at work on Heaven’s Feel, which so far has been wonderfully animated. Fate/Apocrypha, a 25 episode ad for Semiramis’ eventual addition to Fate/Grand Order, just finished airing, and Shaft’s A-team is starting on Fate/Extra in a month. Fate/Extella Link is coming out later this year. FGO has started yet another season where Chaldea is blown up by space aliens. And as the cherry on top, we get a slice-of-life cooking series with the main cast. The only way this concept could be better is if the servants had to battle with cooking a la Food Wars.

First, I need to address something really, really, really important. For everyone out there going, “Fate/Zero is the best Fate!” please for the love of Osaberface-sama, please stop. Fate/Zero, by itself, is an excellent anime and light novel with some great characters (Kiritsugu is now playing a larger role in Heaven’s Feel thanks to Urobuchi) and sequences but it’s not the best Fate. Fate is dumb. Fate is silly. Fate is Nasu. And Fate is at its best when it is all of those things.

Fate/Stay Night isn’t popular because Nasu is some sort of acclaimed writer like Gen Urobuchi. Fate is popular because it’s so unapologetically dumb. The main game that spawned all of this gave us “People die if they are killed.” It gave us a threesome with the justification that Saber needs mana, Emiya is inexperienced at mana transfer, so of course Rin has to be the conduit. It gave us “I am the Bone of my Sword,” which no one will mistake for a Shakespearan sonnet. It gave us penis worms. It gave us Sakura biting into a tuna because I don’t know.

I haven’t even touched on the crazy shit in Fate/Extra, Fate/hollow ataraxia, and FGO, all of which feature scenarios from Nasu, so they are all 100% canon to the Nasuverse.

Also most of the fun with Fate has to be the fan creations from Melty Blood to the 15,532 FGO webcomics to JAM IT IN. Fate is a meme factory from Gates of Babylon to being lancer is suffering to mapo tofu (beautifully drawn by ufotable here though not as great as the Kirei mapo tofu scene in Heaven’s Feel). Quick. You got ten seconds. Can you name one meme from Fate/Zero?

Tick tock.

Nope? See. How can Fate/Zero be the best Fate series if it can’t even generate a top ten Fate meme? Fate/Zero is the least Fate of all of the incarnations. That’s fine, but just don’t say it is true or best Fate. It is something different, and we should be glad that the Fate franchise can go from grimdark of Fate/Zero to the Code Geass of Apocrypha to the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou of Emiya-san to the AAA production of Heaven’s Feel to the Precure of Ilya to the WTF of Carnival Phantasm without batting an eye.

I think if you watched this show before you watched/played Fate/Stay Night, it would make a lot more sense why Emiya would become such a chick magnet. He pleasures them all with his food.

I even like the cheesy slice-of-life element at the end where Emiya tells Saber that soba also can stand for “soba ni” as in “be with” someone. It was genuine enough that it make the Fashion Czar angry that her OTP of Emiya x Rin might be threatened.

Wait, we have Kiritsugu in the ED, but not Kotomine? Is this the first Fate animated story without a Kirei or a Kotomine? Wow. He has to show up in the mapo tofu episode at the very least, right? YOROKONDE SHOUNEN!

(Again, the only franchise as sprawling and as dumb as Fate is Star Wars, which people also take too seriously. It’s best when it’s dumb. It’s best when a moon is dropped on Chewbacca or when Lu’uke battles Luke or when Palatine tries to hop into Leia’s womb or when Luke is milking a blue space alien or Luke and Poe’s mom go on a covert op to steal force sensitive trees or a few dozen Ewoks defeated a garrison of the Empire’s top soldiers or when a Jedi widow rides a dinosaur to defeat a Hutt cartel. Star Wars, much like Fate, is best when it is at that perfect level of dumbness. Masters of Teras Kasi went too far though…)

2 Responses to “emiya-san chi no kyou no gohan 1”

@yomikoma: The show does not spend any time introducing the characters, and I have to admit that the main reason I watch it is because of my emotional investment in the characters. If you don’t know anything, I would suggest you watch it with someone who knows the characters (and enjoys watching them in a slice-of-life anime) and could tell you who’s who without going into too much detail.